By Paul Franson
On a recent trip to Italy, I somehow ended up in a foreign restaurant in Milan even though I always say, "Never eat in a foreign restaurant overseas (except in England, where you don’t eat in an English restaurant.") The fact that it featured food from Sardinia, which is part of Italy, didn’t change things. It was as foreign to the Milanese as a Nepalese restaurant.
Costa Smeralda gave me a chance to try bottarga, something I had been curious about after seeing many references. The pressed, dried roe of tuna and certain other fish, it satisfies the strange human taste for strong salty fishy flavors that also led to Worchester sauce, anchovies on pizza, Caesar salads and Vietnamese fish sauce. Needless to say, if you don’t like anchovies, skip this recipe!
When I returned to Napa Valley, I discovered that Dean & Deluca carries tuna bottarga — for $110 per pound. The stuff is expensive but exceedingly intense. It comes in a dense black bric that's cut to order. You might be able to substitute cheap fish roe for a milder version of this dish.
Bottarga can be used in a number of ways, but the best way to appreciate it is probably what I had at Costa Smeralda: Pasta with bottarga. They served a very simple sauce with ordinary dried spaghetti. It doesn’t seem to go with soft fresh pasta.
Ingredients
1/2 lb. spaghetti
lots of water for cooking
salt for water
3 tablespoons mild olive oil (save the intense
green stuff for something else)
2 cloves of garlic cut in half
1 oz bottarga
fresh ground pepper
It couldn’t be simpler. While the pasta is boiling, heat the oil to a moderate setting and sweat the flavor out of the garlic until it’s just starting to turn golden, then discard it. Reduce heat to low and add bottarga to the warm oil. Smush it around until it dissolves in the oil.
Drain the pasta when it’s ready and toss with the bottarga sauce. Serve. No cheese and probably no additional salt needed. It came plain at Costa Smeralda but you could tart it up with a little dollop of caviar if you want to be fancy.
Serves four as an appetizer (in fact, probably at least one of the four will demure, making it perfect for the others.)
I preceded the pasta with tomatoes in a bit of extra virgin olive oil, and followed it with assorted seafood grilled over wood plus spinach sautéed in garlic and oil. Magnificent. The restaurant simplified the choice of wine. It only had one white, vermentino di Sardegna, and it was perfect.